University of Nevada, RenoE-Mail authorETHAN W. RIS is an assistant professor in the College of Education at the University of Nevada, Reno. He received his Ph.D. from Stanford University in 2017. His research focuses on top-down reform and its effects on American schools and colleges in the 20th century. His recent work includes “The Education of Andrew Carnegie: Strategic Philanthropy in American Higher Education” (2017) in The Journal of Higher Education, and coauthorship of Higher Education and Silicon Valley: Connected but Conflicted (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017).

Between 1895 and 1920, a cohort of business, philanthropic, and academic leaders wielding tremendous wealth and power sought to reshape the form and function of American higher education. Their efforts were largely unsuccessful, but studying them helps us understand the recurrent impulse to reform America’s colleges and universities.